On The Collapse of Complex Societies 461
One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
Stupid decisions? (Score:2, Insightful)
Societies don't make decisions. (Score:2, Insightful)
Society is the aggregation of the decisions we make as individuals.
It's simple (Score:2, Insightful)
Raises stress, causes more tension and then boom.
At least that's my take...think I may be a bit too cynical
Fisheries. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.
I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.
Re:Stupid decisions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Individual's property rights (Score:2, Insightful)
The essay presents one example of the civilization that wiped out all of the trees it depended on. If that civilization allowed for the ownership of pieces of land, the individuals with a little more foresight could conserve the trees on their plots of land. On the other hand, if every tree belongs to the person who cut it down, then even if the majority of the society is conscious of the problem, the nearsighted minority is still able to cut down the last tree.
The problem with any kind of "public" resource is that it doesn't belong to everyone -- it belongs to noone. Noone cares enough about it to protect or conserve it. Everyone just wants to grab as big a piece as possible.
Re:Stupid decisions? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say that millenia-old artifacts which are our only link to the beginnings of civilization are a little more important than you make them out to be.
Re:Collapses (Score:5, Insightful)
They plant commercially viable species, and harvest them at the optimum ROI age (15-30 years). A healthy forest has a variety of species at various stages of maturity. A commercial plantation is no more a forest than a swimming pool is a wetland.
Re:Societies don't make decisions. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's more true now than it has been for most of our history. On some level that's always true, but I doubt keeping Saddam in power was truly the will of the Iraqi people.
A lot of factors, not least of which is governmental power being vested in a few or even one person, bend the decisions the "society" would make if it was in some hypothetical "pure" state. (I personally interpret Arrow's Theorum to imply that there is no such thing as one clear "voice of the society" no matter how you slice it. YMMV, but it's not an unreasonable corrolary.)
But even now it's not completely true. The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The aggregations of decisions we make as individuals has an impact, but in the final analysis if Jack T. Ass, owner of a large logging interest, decides to clear cut a county in Montana and does it before the law (i.e., "the rest of us") even notices, then the environmental damage has occurred, regardless of how the rest of the individuals feel about it.
Re:Collapses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Collapses (Score:3, Insightful)
Many logging companies do, although mostly they do it because it makes business sense to do so (i.e. "Our property size is limited, and we need to still have trees to cut down 5 years from now"). But there is a definite problem when a resource is perceived as being "essentially unlimited", and/or when people are too poor or greedy to care that a resource is being depleted. A perfect example is the rainforests, which will, at the current rates of destruction, be gone within our lifetimes. Yet the people who are cutting them down probably tell themselves, "well there is so much rainforest left that there will still be plenty left by the time I retire, and by then it will be someone else's problem". Additionally they may be saying, "I need to feed my family", and the logging companies will be saying "there is so much rainforest there to still be chopped down that if we try do it responsibly, other companies will be able to log cheaper and faster" (tragedy of the commons).
I don't know (Score:3, Insightful)
It comes down to greed and human nature. Most people are extremely selfish and hypocritical, and this is be basis of most "stupid" decisions.
We, as a species, are polluting our planet. Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one. A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Effects of Limited Liability Corporations (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm. What effects of this do we now see?
And these are the most powerful organizations in the world today...
Re:Individual's property rights (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the typical libertarian response, and it's true enough for things that can be owned. Although not entirely true, in that nothing can be entirely subdivided - it may make you happy to remove your trees from your mountain because you later plan to mine it, but when my valley land gets covered with mud, I'm not too thrilled anyway.
But further, what do you say to things that fundamentally cannot be subdivided and owned, like air?
Re:Individual's property rights (Score:5, Insightful)
What an... interesting view of things.
So, I presume that you'd like to argue that Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, etc. should be privatized - because obviously them being National Parks (which are de facto public property managed by the National Park Service) means that nobody cares about them.
Frankly, when it comes to individuals they generally act in the most self improving way possible. If I owned a few hundred acres of trees I may be tempted to sell the rights to log them to someone for a few million. After all, they're my trees, and I can do what I want with them.
On the otherhand, there's some very large swaths of land near my house that won't ever be logged... they're part of the Chatahoochee National Park system. While other greenspace all around is being cut down to put in new subdivisions, this land (which was either purchased by the Federal government, or by local interest groups and then donated to the government) isn't going to sprout McMansions anytime soon.
I'm not a fan of big government, but claiming that individual rights would solve everything is a load of crap. I can choose to pollute my bit of land afterall, and then say that I was within my rights to do so since it was my land. Funny thing though, eco systems don't respect legal borders.
Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you explain that the society of Israeli Jews is failing due to "Under-Population".
In fact, they will be a significan minorty in 50 years. Palestinians have significantly positive birth rates, while Jews just are procreating enough.
This guy doesn't realize something. We can't see the Forest from the Trees. But things change. We grow forests overnight practically these days. In Minnesota, far more trees are planted each year, than harvested.
Modern societies don't fail due to Natural Resources. They fail because we can't seem to get along with each other. Or, we can't get along with our neighbors. Or, our neighbors hate us, and conquer us.
Modern societies fail because they don't value life. For instance, Genocide, and dare I say Abortion?
Re:Individual's property rights (Score:1, Insightful)
When that happens, the land grab begins and the resources of intellectuals begins to run dry. When I asked Noam Chomsky about this issue he told me:
" But the problems you pose are very serious, no matter what technology or scientific knowledge we may have in mind. It's certain that powerful institutions will seek to use anything for their own purposes, which are only by accident benign (as Adam Smith also recognized, and emphasized, in passages that are rarely cited). We always have to be alert to this danger, and there is no formula as to how to avert it."
Re:Societies don't make decisions. (Score:5, Insightful)
A mob doesn't act like an individual multiplied by a thousand. Any single person who acted like one one-thousandth of a mob would be institutionalized.
One generality about large organizations is that they're inflexible. They're like computer programs -- they may perform well or poorly at the problem they're designed for, but give them unexpected input or a novel situation and they crash.
William Livingston wrote an interesting book about this in 1988, called "Have Fun At Work". He points out that when you toss a complex problem at a system that doesn't know how to deal with it, some predictable malfunctions happen. One is that the real problem becomes taboo for discussion. Another is that all proposed actions make the problem worse. Want examples? Consider the "War on Drugs", or your workplace.
The cure he proposes is to implement tightly coupled feedback cycles. For example, one software company bills its business units for the tech support calls that come in about the software they produce.
I'd also suggest keeping organizations small enough that it's tolerable for them to die. One of the advantages of real capitalism would be that when (not if) a company fails to adapt to change, it ceases to exist. An extreme version of this point of view was Jefferson's idea that there should be a revolution every twenty years.
Re:I don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford.
A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
Western countries are barely cranking out children at a break-even rate. Only countries where cheap labor is beneficial have a high birth rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Many groups can easily see the problems of other groups, and want to do something about it. When they do, it's called "war".
Argument by non-sequitur? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of the book, in case you missed it, is that the classic argument (they're savages, we're civilized) is not a scientific approach to the question of why certain achievements occurred in Eurasia rather than Africa, the Americas, or Oceania.
In fact, the arguments are not deterministic. The advantages that peoples had on a particular continent did not a priori determine their success, but does provide an explanation for why some societies could "advance" more rapidly than others.
Re:Chaos theory of human societies? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're near an attractor, it will take a lot to dislodge you from near that attractor. A butterfly flapping its wings won't cause a hurricane, but a volcano erupting on the other side of the plant might.
But what people usually forget is that there can be multiple attractors, and if you're not that close to one attractor it may not take much to push you over the edge to another attractor.
That's what happened at Easter Island. Cutting down the first tree caused no harm. Saving the last tree wouldn't have prevented the massive population crash. The details would have been changed in each case, but in a century you would still have ended up with a heavily forested island or a stripped one.
But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead. What's the consequences of cutting down a single tree? What if it's used to shore up the ground in the forest it came from?
What does that mean to us today? That we need to be careful since we're clearly in a chaotic realm and we can't predict the long term consequences of our actions. Some of this is due to natural variability (e.g., did you realize that it's been an unusually long time since a massive volcanic eruption, and that alone has driven global warming to a large extent?), some of it is due to human neglect (overfishing, agricultural monoculturism). Some of our problems are due to prior solutions - our artificial fertilizers prevented global starvation in the late 19th century but has now spread throughout the entire biosphere, resulting in plant growth and algae blooms even far from human activities.
N.B., that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to change policies that will push us back to a desirable attractor. It means that there's no "final answer"... and that the consequences if we fail can be disasterous. It's not like we haven't had clear warnings (Easter Island, the Irish potato famine, smallpox ripping through the new world or syphillis (IIRC) through the old one.)
Re:Chaos theory of human societies? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Butterfly flaps wings leads to a very bad rainstorm three years later where there would have been nicer weather.
2) Rainstorm keeps scientist indoors. (His office is on a marshy area which floods easily.)
3) Scientist, frustrated with not being able to get to his lab, decides to try and work on a form of controlling his lab remotely.
4) After he decides to stick with it, the idea, once implemented, becomes a key idea and is used heavily in gravity technology.
5) The gravity technology is used to create a form of "gravitational tidal wave bomb" which is used to destroy the solar system by a fanatic nut who was born when his newlywed parents decided to make the best of the afforementioned rainstorm.
The odds are absurd, of course, but it is possible. QED.
Irrational Behavior? (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, I understand why we continue the drug war...
Re:Stupid decisions? (Score:2, Insightful)
Halliburton's?
Re:Chaos theory of human societies? (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the book, and I didn't find any "butterfly effect"-style determinism in it. Diamond's explanations for why civilizations rise and fall seem perfectly sensible to me. Would you seriously suggest that a civilization that was lucky enough to rise in an area blessed with an order of magnitude greater arable land (Eurasia) than another (Australia) would have a harder time developing a leisure class, with its concomitant art and science? What might explain it, then? Racial superiority? Manifest destiny?
Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't nitpick particular instances in history and say, "This is where everything else inevitably sprang from." Diamond's book simply says: People tend to go where food is. If there's enough food, they stay, forming a mass. Masses of people tend to interact in interesting ways, producing culture. Positive feedback loops tend to develop. Cultures that miss out on the effects of the feedback tend to be dominated in the future. That's a powerful enough set of axioms to explain a great deal of history, without being mechanistic enough that it claims to determine how history will unroll into the future. Note the emphasis on large-scale aggregations of humans, long time scales, large land areas, etc. in the book. No butterflies required. Plenty of room for free humans to try and leave their mark in history.
Re:The problem is overpopulation. (Score:3, Insightful)
And your solution to this problem, mein fuhrer?
Max
Blah ideas. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, all they said was that there are a class of problems that indivualhumans are not good at solving, and that governements are nor perfect.
It would be more interesting if he at least discusssed possible ways to fix the problem.
Take the simple case of lawsuits. The class action lawsuit was designed to solve the specific kinds of problems mentioned by the author. The author should have discussed the value/flaws.
Re:Stupid decisions? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Ironic that the theft of artifacts is the only thing the left is willing to criticize Saddam's administration about, and they still lay the blame on the US, instead of the people who actually did the looting."
End Rant Capture 04282003
Begin Ad Hominem Attack Capture 04282003
"In conclusion, you and your misplaced priorities disgust me. People rate over museum collections anyday and it takes a diseased mind to miss that."
End Ad Hominem Attack Capture 04282003
To paraphrase and possibly pervert the Great Electric Monk:
Civilizations pass through three distinct stages.
1.How can we obtain food?
2.Why do we need nourishment to sustain our corporeal forms?
3.Where shall we have lunch?
Obviously all truly vigorous societies seek to solve and answer all three questions...all the time. Protecting archaeological artifacts is a function of a society which values the answers to the second and third questions---in addition to creating the environment to answer the first question: provide food and water.
In response to your vitriol, why is the right so interested in shifting the justification for this war? Iraq attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11th becomes Iraq met with Al Qaeda agents becomes Iraq will give WMD to Al Qaeda..Iraq has WMD...Iraq is a fascist hole that imprisons and murders thousands...
Why the statement that disagreement over national policy is the product of a diseased mind? Why the fear of speaking out in opposition to national policy? (Natalie Maines)
I liken the ideological right to a society suffering from failure by false analogy. They identify those that they hate and generate a broad set of terms to define those that they hate. Anyone---Osama, Jose Padilla, Natalie Maines, Saranda Robbinson, me---who fits any of their terms or argues about the definitions of those terms must be a "diseased mind."
A free society does not imprison hundreds of people without trial or legal representation. A free society does not imprison people without any communication with the outside world. A free society does not require the registration of certain ethnic groups. These actions are representative of a society in decline.
I disagree with you. I do not believe you are mentally diseased. I seek a society where we can reach consensus and agreement. You seem to seek a society where those who disagree with you are--at the very least---ostracized and shouted down.
Sorry to bother you. I need to go back to cutting my palm trees now.
Re:I don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
Except when societies make those mistakes, they tend to be doozies. Take for instance communism or fascism. Both had their ringleaders, but really the people collectively brought it upon themselves and then suffered the consequences. Also you're forgetting the biggest problem with group-think: it inevitably descends down to the lowest common denominator.
of course, they do (Score:3, Insightful)
When Bush was elected, or when Bush attacked Iraq, or when the health care plan was shot down, or when more money got allocated to prisons than crime prevention, those were "decisions that society made".
By your reasoning, we should say that "people don't make decisions, neurons do". But that's an unnecessarily narrow definition of the term "decision".
Re:Chaos theory of human societies? (Score:1, Insightful)
Every spring I can tell you that the Contiental United States will warm up. Snow will melt and storms will develop in the Atlantic.
Climate is the overall weather of an area. When we record climate data, we record average temperatures, temperature ranges and high and low temperatures.
Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given time that includes temperature, precipitation, humidity, pressure, winds.
In the general theme of Guns, Germs and Steel Diamond likes to cut down the role of free thinking societies in the success of Europeans and America and actually says that Europeans have geneticly inferior mental capacity. He tries too hard to reduce history to biology and geography.
Re:It's a flame, but important anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply stating that assigning artificial costs to compensate for market externalities is not sufficient to solving the problems associated with long-term ecological and environmental change. Diamond is pointing out that recognizing the costs and properly assessing and the potential costs, are hampered by the psychological and sociological structures embedded within society. He's pointing out that economics alone cannot solve the problem. Because the root systemic causes of the problems don't lie only in the economic realm, but also in the psychological and sociological realm.
Re:We're missing a great opportunity (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't know (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the problem isn't isolated to nature, but can be an economic problem as well. Take consumer credit for example. People want more than they can afford and use credit cards as a crutch towards the short term attainment of their desires, rather than realize that they simply can't afford to live that way, thus proving Diamond's theory on psychological denial. What ends up happening there is that the slow build up of credit results in the erosion of ability to pay it off and ultimately one of two things happen -- either the individual changes their ways and must figure out how to pay it off, meaning that a lifestyle change is in order, or the individual defaults on the credit, possibly loses the things bought on credit, and is denied the use of credit, meaning the same lifestyle change occurs, but the results are far more dramatic and much longer-term, where not only you, but any children and possibly grand-children are affected in the long-term due to your short-term folly.
The basic problem is that people are fickle when it comes to realizing that you can only live within your means, and societies that allow people to continue this fantasy are part of the problem. The solution is to realize that you can't sustain an unrealistic lifestyle in the long-term and modify your behavior to match your income in order to survive. The price of not being able to realize this is extinction.
Re:Jared Diamond is grossly overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, once a society has advanced technology and economy, it can do all kinds of things. The question is, how did those civilizations get to that point?
Collapse or Reorganization? (Score:3, Insightful)
Diamond seems to accept such a premise in spite of strong archaeological evidence that it is nonsense. The descendants of the Classic Period Maya, the Anasazi, and all his other examples are all very much alive today and most still live on or near the ancestral lands from which they supposedly "vanished" centuries ago.
Folks who have thought about this issue for a little longer than Diamond recognize continuity between groups that may have undergone major socio-economic changes resulting from systemic conflicts between they way people made their living and the stresses that the natural or cultural environment could handle. So, instead of collapse, what we are really talking about is *reorganization.* Seen in this light, the Civil War could be viewed as a major period of such reorganization...in which the Federalist system "collapsed" and was replaced by the National system. This example points out another omission of Diamond's, namely that some societies, such as the Mississippian Chiefdoms of the southeastern US, shifted organization in the presence of abundant natural resources and collapsed sheerly as the result of conflicting social forces.
In sum, I would take any of Diamond's work with an entire shaker of salt grains, recognizing his tendency toward ethnocentrism and environmental determinism.
Instead, here are a few sometimes thick, but much more cogent resources on collapse and reorganization.
Culbert, T. Patrick (editor)
1972 The Classic Maya Collapse. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Yoffee, Norman and George L. Cowgill
1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, edited by N. Yoffee and G. L. Cowgill, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Weiss, H., M. -A. Courty, W. Wetterstrom, F. Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow and A. Curnow
1993 The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millenium North Mesopotamian Civilization. Science 261:995-1004.
Blanton, Richard E., Stephen A. Kowalewski, Gary M. Feinman and Laura M. Finsten
1993 Ancient Mesoamerica. Second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Re:The problem is overpopulation. (Score:3, Insightful)
But they do. So overpopulation, while it may be a problem, is just not something you can 'solve'. Not unless you're willing to wipe out a great many of those people. And if that's so, I nominate *you* to be one of the one's to be exterminated.
To a person not invested in murdering billions, overpopulation isn't a 'problem', it's a simple fact of life that one has to deal with. You might decide to try to do something about the growth rate (the most effective method being to raise the standard of living for every country on the planet), but the current numbers will not decline unless some rabid greenie with a supervirus is let loose upon the world.
The world has a certain population of human beings. Deal with it. Problem or not it's a fact of life and the gnashing of teeth and the wringing of hands does nothing other than to suggest that certain nations with high birth rates are to 'blame'.
No doubt these same folks will scream for the banning of immortality since it would exacerbate the 'problem' - well, ban it for everyone else *but themselves*, of course.....
Max
Parent overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bullshit on this one. Show some links and back up your statements.
The "BC dept. of forestry" is actually called the BC Ministry of Forests. For some information from them about wood density, you could start with this paper [gov.bc.ca] on hemlock density. From the summary (Page 39):
Hmm, one coastal species down. You could look here [gov.bc.ca] next.Here is some info on biodiversity [gov.bc.ca] Disturbance is a natural part of succession [usask.ca], and any removal of trees interferes with the forest ecosystem. Many forest systems depend on a major disturbance such as fire for regeneration, which is why properly managed clear cuts can actually be beneficial for some species (hint - look at the age distribution [gov.bc.ca] of trees within old growth stands - they are often within a few years of age for species such as fir). Biodiversity [gov.bc.ca] is greatly impacted by succession, and while poor forest management (guided by short-term economic goals such as unemployment rates) will screw things up, it is only a question of degree.
As I understand it, the critical factors in managing the forest are how much impact a given management practice will have:
It is a gross simplification to say that clearcuts are bad, let alone to say that clearcuts are bad for all tree species in every biogeoclimatic zone.
Re:The problem is overpopulation. (Score:1, Insightful)
And a work incentive-reward system that is bronze age, at best. 5000 years outdated, at least.
Technically, food production in the world could feed everyone today. Except for generalized selfishness and idiocy. They also call it "humanity". Starving, miserable, futureless non-beings are much easier to break and govern. And to make support the system that breaks and barely feeds them.
Europe and the US are considerably more densely populated than most of the rest of the world.
Giving people decent living conditions and education almost immediately brings birthrates down to nearly 2 per. Also technically feasible.
Back to fish
Most overfishing is done by 1st world factory-ships off other peoples shores, or over-technified fleets near their own.
6 billion people do not eat all those fish (and Dolphins, by the way).
Less than a billion mostly de-melanized 1st worlders, and their land herds, do. Oh, and their fishmeal protein fed "fish-farms", too, now.
And a vast percentage of it ends up in trash landfills. Or compacted into blocks and thrown in "ocean-fills".
Re:Chaos theory of human societies? (Score:3, Insightful)
But during a long period in the middle they could have changed the outcome *in either direction* by seemingly small changes. That's the chaotic realm - it was impossible to where any simple change would lead.
I disagree that this is chaotic. I suspect that there was some number of trees that, if cut down, would have been OK, and that number + 1 would have not been OK. Now, it would be _extremely_ different to calculate this (as a lot of other factors influence it), but that doesn't make it chaotic.
Chaotic would be if there was a region in the middle where based on knowing the outcome of chopping down 'n' trees you couldn't really say anything sensible about the outcome of either 'n-1' or 'n+1' trees.
It is an inordinately complex system that we lack any suitable knowledge to model, but I don't think it was chaotic.
With the correct knowledge specified to a reasonable degree of accuracy, I think it could have been predicted.